ironies abound

Haven't heard from my boy in two days now, and it seems forever. I'm supposing he is far out in the desert finding and framing beautiful images...meanwhile, back here in SF irony rules the day. The day began fairly harmless with my first taxi ride in the city. Chatty-Cathy (the driver) certainly challenged my morning communication skills. Thankfully I had the wherewithall to make coffee and take with me this am and could pass small talk along the short ride over to my boss's house. In another first (becoming less and less spectacular as novelty) I went to the (oh so surprisingly) uber-wealthy Mountain View. Our task here was to measure a dental office for a renovation. As my second site-measurement trip with the office, I am finding that I can finally do some things fairly confidently and helpfully. Minimal in the overall scheme of working in an office but certainly treasured experience on this end. After what we could only describe as "surviving" through the lite-rock playing in the dental office and trying to maneuvre around the small, nearly inaccessible nooks and reaching around patient patients and doctors to measure the space, we were happy to be back on the road to our comfortable, dirty city. Only... about ten minutes down the road, "WHACK....GLUMP GLUMP GLUMP...." Yeah, we got a flat. And where's the irony you ask? Steve just had the car serviced YESTERDAY (actually at the mechanic just next door to our apartment, ha!)!!! They had found a nail in the tire but said they had removed it... The nail was gone but the slow leak was not and BAM the sidewall popped. So, there we were, just outside Mountain View, Cupertino, Los Altos (aka Silicon Valley) with a popped tire and tight lugnuts. Yep, we were just about to save our own day by changing the tire (thank you, bro Kevin for those invaluable lessons when I was 16 and sitting down on Pruett St with a busted sidewall..."I'm only showing you this once. Don't expect me to drive all the way to town next time...Are you paying attention???"). But, those damned lugnuts just would not loosen. We tried everything and then just decided that two architects were just not fit to use tools. Instead we used those brilliant, sharp (ha!) tools on our shoulders and figured out that Steve had road-side assistance with his insurance and we happily called for help. Two and a half hours, two very kind Mountain View cops, and two bottles of water (from the incredibly nice second cop who was about to go off duty and thought we needed to stay hydrated... quite a redemption for Cali folks :) ) later our rescue arrived...As he strolled up with this amazing (yes, in this situation it was, relatively speaking) jack and crow bar that made our little trunk tools seem quite flimsy, we really could only notice the flash of his---get this---BATMAN belt buckle. He was definitely our hero, and after many many thanks we were off again. We arrived back to the city safely, and I made it just in time to let Pep out...poor little thing was about to pop. I made a pizza, thinking "man, I would just order out if it wasn't so stinkin hard to let people into the building without going down and physically letting them in" and after a long, tedious day of measuring a dental office... I broke a tooth on my lazily half-cooked pizza. Do I sound cranky? Eh, just chalk it up to another day in SF.

How many architects does it take to change a flat??

This was the real rescue of the week though... From our office window we could see the 250 acre wild-fire that was burning on Angel Island across the bay and the amazing force of helicopters and firefighters that put the blaze out by noon.

But, it was too late for the rescue of the Monkey... indeed, this might be the end of orange monkey.

Here's Pep taking out the frustrations of a city dog.

Or maybe she just misses our boy, too. sniff.